Into the Vault.

Last night I dreamed of face painted French boys and Versailles. Got me thinking of France and Europe. This morning I whipped through the vault of 2007. The year I really learned to shoot. I will never forget the day Auntie Marj (God rest her) handed me her old Nikon F3, a huge Ziploc bag of 400 PI film and said, "shoot". I wrote about that moment in my Photography Letter of Intent. Shoot. A simple instruction. There were no lessons, she was not a woman of lessons. Just giver! So I GAVER and blew through 35 rolls of color film, learning as I went from country to country, shooting through train windows, hanging upside down from balconies in Vienna, from a casual table in Paris; all of it spent.

Kit, Rab and I wandered through Europe with slack jaws, seeing things I never knew existed (it doesn't take much to wow me), I shot and shot and shot and shot and shot some more. I remember the battery dying somewhere in the middle of Venice. At that point, I was unaware of shooting manually, sans battery but by the grace of God we SOMEHOW wound through that beautiful sinking city and found a camera shop and managed to carry on to Naples. Naples! Holy cow. In retrospect, that entire journey was nothing short of a miracle. Italy was insane. Spain in the membrane. France! Heavy and exciting Berlin. Belgium, my heart is there. The list is endless. What an adventure. Looking forward to the next.

These are some of the things I have seen on my travels.